Employees viewed Fadell — who’s known as the godfather of the iPod and played a key role in designing the iPhone — as a product visionary and leader. Fawaz, by contrast, was considered a business development manager, focused on efficiencies. … Another said he believes...

The B-21’s core design initiative has been to use mature and semi-mature components and subsystems not only to lower risk and to decrease development time and costs, but also to better ensure support for the aircraft over time. Although many look to history to predict...

In the runup to the planned debut of the latest MacBook Pro, Apple’s home computer division had a bit of a meltdown. Enhanced battery life was supposed to be one of the big selling points for the new version of the company’s main laptop, with...

Samsung declined to comment on whether it moved up the Note 7 launch to beat Apple’s. “Timing of any new mobile product launch is determined by the mobile business division based on the proper completion of the development process and the readiness of the product...

According to Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, megaprojects in the past 70 years have consistently come in over budget while delivering less than half of their promised monetary benefit. … His research on megaprojects has been cited by both backers and critics of the tunnel. Nine...

Two years ago, Electronic Arts, the second-largest U.S. video game company, ran on promises. … Several of EA’s biggest 2013 releases, including entries in its SimCity and Battlefield franchises, were so bug-ridden on release that they crashed game servers and were essentially unplayable for days...

The notion that an inadequate project management schedule is often the root cause of other problems in the project generated some insightful responses. While insightful, they also illustrate what I consider to be the typical misconceptions we have about how project problems are just too complex to ever be "simply the schedule."

I am a big advocate of getting the project management tool schedule right for a project. While this seems obvious, what is not often as obvious is that a lot of the problems seen in a project can often be root caused back to an inadequate schedule estimate.

While the realistic project management schedule is still a challenge, more productivity improvements happen with realistic schedules because people have the time to innovate and improve how they do their work. This is in contrast to the compressed schedule where there is insufficient time to just get the core tasks done which in turn discourages taking the time to try new things that could improve productivity.

We know that throwing additional resources at an already late project rarely makes the project run on time. Often it only makes it run later. Similarly, going with an aggressive schedule with an early date for the purpose of actually hitting a later date is equally counterproductive.

We've seen project management tool reports where the team bragged "and we finished early!" Kind of like it was a badge of honor or something. Here are three good reasons we've found for not wanting to finish a project early.